Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a battery class determination device and a battery class determination method.
Description of the Related Art
A vehicle driven chiefly by an engine is mounted with a battery as a power source for a starter-motor to start the engine. As the battery, in general, a lead storage battery is employed. Meanwhile, charge/discharge characteristics of lead storage batteries has been improved recently. The lead storage batteries have been thus employed as a power source in special-purpose electric vehicles such as electricity-driven carts and forklifts because if an expensive lithium-ion secondary battery is used in those vehicles, a good paying business cannot be expected.
The most frequent trouble (i.e., the number of mobilizations requested to Japan Automobile Federation) that private cars in Japan encounter is a battery trouble such as dead and lower performance of car batteries. An idling stop system has been employed recently in the vehicles driven chiefly by engines in order to reduce gas emissions from these vehicles. Nevertheless if a lead storage battery to be used in non-idling stop system or a lower grade lead storage battery having poor performance is used in the idling stop system, the system sometimes will not work properly.
To prevent these battery troubles, a determination device that identifies a class of a battery mounted to a vehicle is proposed (e.g., Patent Literature 1).